Note: This dashboard contains the results of a predictive model. The model is assuming an exponential growth rate in the initial stages of the COVID19 pandemic. Data is changing hourly therefore the accuracy of the model is variable. This is for informational purposes only.

Predicted Cases By Country

Select a country from the drop down list below to toggle the visualization.

Growth Rate Predictions

Text(0.5, 0.98, 'Posterior of daily growth')

Model Diagnostics - Trace Plots

The following trace plots help to assess the convergence of the MCMC sampler. You can safely ignore this if not familiar with MCMC.

Analysis Overview

The model that we are building assumes exponential growth. This is only applicable to the initial stages of a pandemic outbreak once growth slows the accuracy of the model will deteriorate to statistical insignificance. However, in the early stages of an outbreak it can provide an accurate scale and trajectory.1

We assume a negative binomial likelihood as we are dealing with count data. A Poisson could also be used but the negative binomial allows us to also model the variance separately to give more flexibility.

The model is also hierarchical, pooling information from individual countries.


  1. This notebook gets up-to-date data from the "2019 Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Data Repository by Johns Hopkins CSSE" GitHub repository. This code is provided under the BSD-3 License.